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Neither the University, (the European Peace
University) nor the town where it is
located, (Stadtschlaining, 120 Km from
Vienna) is a traditional destination of the
typical Nigerian seeking the Golden Fleece.
One must be an intellectually restless mind
to seek out and make the trip to this
university although it is as much a
university as any other, if not better,
should one isolate its comparatively more
affordable fees and even the nobility of
mind behind it, for example
It was established to offer training in
Peace and Conflict Studies and related
fields and this is what it has been doing
for twenty years on in the 13th
Century Castle that distinguishes the town.
The Castle is a gift from Austria’s
Burgenland provincial authorities to Dr.
Gerald Mada, a politician and a former
Minister of Culture from this province who
promptly turned it into a Peace education
centre of university status. Dr Mada’s
decision was a reflection of the anti-war
consciousness in the area because this town,
being the Eastern flank of Austria, has been
a site of wars and invasion, beginning with
the Mongolians in the 13th
Century, informing the building of the
Castle as a communal hole-in. The Castle is
as wonderful as the Egyptian Pyramids in
Cairo.
But in the 20th Century,
closeness to the Hungarian borders/Iron
Curtain was the problem for this community.
It is 30 minutes to the Austria-Hungary
border from Stadtschlaining. Being that
close to the Iron Curtain meant that about
twenty five years ago, Stadtschlaining/Oberwart,
etc was the poorest part of Austria. In
fact, many people from the area were
emigrating as nobody could have imagined the
level and quality of super modern
infrastructure they have today. It is in
this Village, (the owners call it a town)
that this reporter has found himself and
would remain till much later in November
2010 in pursuit of a Certificate of
Attendance in “Global and Regional
Conflicts”. And it is this village that has
got me thinking, for two reasons.
One is the functionality of the Western
world, epitomized by the solidity of the
infrastructure development in
Stadtschlaining, a mere village. I have been
to Western capitals but not Western
villages. Two, because the town as well as
the university is almost like being in the
middle of nowhere or a prison which,
according to the late Egyptian President,
Anwar Sadat, is one of the only two places
one gets to know him or her real self, my
course and the environment have ignited a
thinking session in me. I am pondering many
things but especially these:
How do we in Africa explain the material
progress and the functionality of the
Western World? What explains the racial
correspondence between prosperity and
poverty, order and anarchy in the Western
World and in the Global South respectively?
How would Africa make it eventually or are
we just heading to de-linking and becoming
the zoo of humanity, to quote Sule Lamido,
governor of Nigeria’s Jigawa State and the
country’s former Minister of Foreign
Affairs?
Taking the stability and functionality of
the Western world as opposed to the chaos in
much of Global South, have we in Africa been
pondering on such questions as (1) the role
of Western dualist teleology in the progress
and stability of the Western world? (I think
it is only Westerners who think of reality
in strict binary terms-good/evil,
Black/white, light/darkness. Most other
civilizations have more holistic or
dialectical notion of things); (2) the role
of Western liberalism in their prosperity;
(3) the role of Communism,
dictatorship/fascism and wars in all these.
Didn’t Communism frighten the European
bourgeoisie into the Welfare State so as to
take care of their populace and blunt the
redistributive attractions of Socialism?
Don’t forget Jesse Jackson’s statement on
arrival in Moscow in 1972 (correct?) He was
reported to have said something like, if
this is Communism, then, what are we waiting
for? (4) What is the role of
nationalism/patriotism/leadership in the
explanation of western prosperity? I am
referring to the nationalism typified by the
Cecil Rhodes who saw imperialism/Colonialism
as a strategic option to social anarchy in
Europe. Those pondering along with me might
want to ask if African presidential palaces,
think-tanks, NGOs and public intellectuals
have been examining the strategic
implications of African teleology/ies or
questioning, in any programmatic way, the
Washington Consensus like Adebayo Adedeji
did to SAP, for example. Adedeji certainly
went beyond lamentations and textbook
anti-imperialism, very much unlike the
ideologues and technocrats who messed up
Africa’s chance in 1999 in terms of a
transformative AU as opposed to the rather
consensual continental platform they have
now.
Taking the second and third questions
together, let me note how my course in
Austria had started on a sufficiently
frightening note to the effect that “the
human race is being given a second chance as
we prepare to destroy ourselves”. This meant
that the challenge or the focus of the
course is on how to transform our means of
engaging in conflicts in a more creative and
productive ways as to make it less violent
and less destructive. To do this, we had to
listen to all the leading philosophers and
theorists as well as World Order scholars on
violence, its motivations, dimensions,
consequences and transformation. And we also
had to look at all conflict forms, from
intra and inter personal to domestic,
gender, communal and ethno-religious
conflicts, civil wars, terrorism and
structural violence such as the North-South
global inequality. But it was the
North-South global inequality that roused
the sleeping dog.
The take-off point had been Vandana Shiva,
the Indian physicist and environmental
activist’s devastating criticism, in fact,
decapitation of Jeffrey Sachs’s book, The
End of Poverty. She hit at Sach’s idea
that “the Industrial Revolution led to new
riches, but much of the world was left far
behind”, describing it as a totally false
history of poverty because the poor, in her
own view, are not those who have been “left
behind” but the ones who have been “robbed”.
Then she pronounced her verdict on Sachs,
“The wealth accumulated by Europe and North
America are largely based on riches taken
from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without
the destruction of India’s rich textile
industry, without the takeover of the spice
trade, without the genocide of the native
American tribes, without African slavery,
the Industrial Revolution would not have
resulted in new riches for Europe or North
America. It was this violent takeover of
Third World resources and markets that
created wealth in the North and poverty in
the South”.
Shiva’s analysis is what we knew in our
undergraduate days as Development and
Underdevelopment theory. It is such a solid
thesis, especially if you ask yourself why
it happened that the over 100 major
conflicts that have taken place since 1945
have taken place in the global South. How
can you develop under conditions of anarchy?
The problem is how worse things are getting
in the African case. Not long ago, the
Bhutan Monarchy was asked about development
by Western journalists. He said that
development is not important in his country.
Instead, it is happiness that is important.
And so today, Bhutan does not measure
progress in terms of Gross National/Domestic
Product but in Gross National Happiness.
Have we seen any such innovative leadership
from anywhere in Africa since the Washington
Consensus?
Have we pondered sufficiently why African
leftists, mainstream intellectuals and
sundry state officials have stopped
discussing anything about the concept of the
developmental state altogether? And is it
not frightening that apart from South Africa
and perhaps a few others, most African
countries have nothing that anyone can call
the knowledge industry? In Nigeria, for
example, what exists as the university
system is totally hopeless. Yet, the
question of the knowledge industry is not
part of the debate in Nigerian politics. But
it is Nigeria that has the capacity to
ignite and lead the African journey of
progress. Can Nigeria do this without
functional universities? No, it cannot.
When one ponders over all these, it seems
that only two things may save us in Africa.
The first is if relationship between Chinese
capital and Western capital were to work out
at cross purposes to the extent that Africa
becomes an unintended beneficiary. This is
not a very hopeful possibility because the
chaos in most of Africa today is not where
many African leaders or their intellectuals,
(if they have any) are observing this
dynamics and taking notes. The second saving
grace is if the United States of America
were to go the way Norwegian peace scholar,
Johann Galtung has hoped: from the American
Empire to the American Republic. The global
policeman role of the United States of
America has meant and will continue to mean
so much pain and misery for most countries
in the Global South, particularly Africa. In
truth though, it is not the United States
that is the problem but capitalism. But it
is American imperialism that has reified
this crisis of ‘accumulation on a World
scale’. And it is such that for the Global
South or, better still, for Africa, they are
forced to accept Tolstoy’s statement to the
effect that “you may not be interested in
war but war is interested in you”. For
example, how can anybody in DRC run away
from war today? DRC today is the classic war
of all against all, just because it is
naturally rich and must be plundered.
It is debateable if the United States of
America still owes the Black World any
apology again after having made a very
potent, powerfully symbolic offer in Barack
Obama, (it is a gesture we cannot dismiss,
however one looks at it), America’s
historical involvement as the leader of the
Western alliance in the exploitation of
Africa probably requires more systemic
‘reparations’. For, certainly, the healing
in Africa’s relationship with the West would
involve some reparations somehow. I would
not know what manner of reparations since
the ‘reparations’ might even have started if
one takes note of the fact that two out of
three most phenomenal personalities in the
World today, (Barack Obama and Michael
Jackson) are African-Americans.
But is this comparable to the contributions
of the defunct USSR as a counter-balancing
oppositional symbol to the Colonial rape in
Africa, her intervention against break-up of
Nigeria, for example, (from hindsight,
break-up in Africa is not worth it) and the
Soviet ideological and military support for
anti-Colonial struggles in Southern Africa.
This is the heart of the matter.
Mr. Onoja of Government House, Dutse, sent
this from Austria & is reachable at
adagboonoja@gmail.com
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